Risking lives to promote climate change hype

Will global warming
alarmists ever set aside their hypotheses, hyperbole, models and ideologies
long enough to acknowledge what is actually happening in the real world outside
their windows? Will they at least do so before setting off on another misguided
adventure? Before persuading like-minded or naïve people to join them? Before
forcing others to risk life and limb to transport – and rescue – them? If
history is any guide, the answer is: Not likely.

The absurd
misadventures of University of New South Wales climate professor Chris Turney is
but the latest example. He and 51 co-believers set out on the (diesel-powered)
Russian charter ship Akademik Shokalskiy
to prove manmade global warming is destroying the East Antarctic ice sheet. Perhaps
they’d been reading Dr. Turney’s website, which claims “an increasing body of
evidence” shows “melting and collapse” across the area. (It is, after all,
summer in Antarctica, albeit a rather cold, icy one thus far.)

Instead of finding open water, they wound
up trapped in record volumes of unforgiving ice, from Christmas Eve until
January 2 – ensnared by Mother Nature’s sense of humor and their own hubris.
The 52 climate tourists were finally rescued by a helicopter sent from Chinese
icebreaker Xue Long, which itself became
locked in the ice. The misadventurers were transferred to Australian icebreaker
Aurora Australis, but the Shokalskiy remains entombed, awaiting
the arrival of US Coast Guard icebreaker Polar
Star. (Meanwhile, Turney hopes to get more grants to study manmade global
warming, to help him make more money from his Carbonscape company, which makes
“green” products from CO2 recovered from the atmosphere.)

As to his expertise, Dr. Turney couldn’t even gauge the ice
conditions the 74 crewmen and passengers were about to sail into. And yet we
are supposed to believe his alarmist forecasts about Earth’s climate.

NASA reports that Antarctic sea ice is now the largest expanse since scientists began measuring its extent in 1979: 19.5 million square kilometers (4,806,000,000 acres) – 2.1 times the size of the entire United States. Another report says ocean melting of western Antarctica’s huge Pine Island Glacier ice shelf is at the lowest level ever recorded, and less than half of what it was in 2010. Reminding us of Monty Python’s pet store clerk, Turney nonetheless insists that the sea ice is actually melting, and his communications director says the record sea ice is due to … global warming! (As they say, fiction has to make sense.)

Equally
amazing, the Shokalskiy was
apparently not equipped with adequate wind and weather monitoring and forecasting
capabilities. The expedition had to contact
climate realists John Coleman, Anthony Watts and Joe Daleo for information
that would allow them to plan their helicopter rescue.

All
of this raises serious questions that most media have ignored. How
could Turney put so many lives
and vessels at risk – people he persuaded to join this expedition, the ship
and crew they hired, the ships and helicopter and crews that came to their
rescue? How did he talk the Russian captain into sailing into these dangerous
waters? Who
will pay for the rescue ships and their fuel and crews? What if one of the
ships sinks – or someone dies? What is Tourney’s personal liability?

This
may be the most glaring example of climate foolishness. But it is hardly the first.

In
2007, Ann Bancroft and Liv Arnesen set off across the Arctic in the dead of
winter, “to raise awareness about global warming,” by showcasing the wide
expanses of open water they were certain they would encounter. Instead,
temperatures inside their tent plummeted to -58 F (-50 C), while outside the
nighttime air plunged to -103 F (-75 C). Facing frostbite, amputated fingers
and toes or even death, the two were airlifted out a bare 18 miles into their
530-mile expedition.

The
next winter it was British swimmer and ecologist Lewis Gordon Pugh, who planned
to breast-stroke across open Arctic seas. Same story. Then fellow Brit Pen
Hadow tried, and failed. In 2010 Aussie Tom Smitheringale set off to
demonstrate “the effect that global warming is having on the polar ice caps.”
He was rescued and flown out, after coming “very close to the grave,” he
confessed.

Hopefully,
all these rescue helicopters were solar-powered. Hardcore climate disaster
adventurers should not be relegated to choppers fueled by evil fossil fuels.
They may be guilty of believing their own alarmist press releases – but losing
digits or ideological purity is a high price to pay.

All these intrepid explorers tried to put the best
spin on their failures. “One of the things we see with global warming is
unpredictability,” Bancroft-Arnesen expedition coordinator Anne Atwood insisted.
“But global warming is real, and with it can come extreme unpredictable changes
in temperature,” added Arnesen. “Global warming can mean colder. It can mean
wetter. It can mean drier. That’s what we’re talking about,” Greenpeace
activist Stephen Guilbeault chimed in.

It’s
been said insanity is hitting your thumb repeatedly with a hammer, expecting it
won’t hurt the next time. It’s also believing hype, models and delusions,
instead of real world observations. Or thinking taxpayers are happy to pay for all
the junk science behind claims that the world faces dangerous manmade global
warming. Or that they are delighted that the EPA and IPCC are increasingly
regulating our lives, livelihoods, liberties, living standards and life
spans, in the name of preventing climate change.

The
fact is, Antarctic ice shelves have broken up many times over the millennia.
Arctic ice has rebounded since its latest low ebb around September 2007. Despite
steadily rising atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, average global temperatures
have been stable or declining since 1997. Seas are rising at barely seven
inches per century. And periods of warmer or colder global and polar climates
are nothing new.

Vikings
built homes, grew crops and raised cattle in Greenland between 950 and 1300,
before they were frozen out by the Little Ice Age and encroaching pack ice and glaciers.
Many warm periods followed, marked by open seas and minimal southward extent of
Arctic sea ice, as noted in ships’ logs and discussed in scientific papers by
Torgny Vinje and other experts. But warm periods of 1690-1710, 1750-1780 and
1918-1940, for instance, were often preceded and followed by colder temperatures,
severe ice conditions and maximum southward ice packs, as during 1630-1660 and
1790-1830.

“Not only in the summer, but in the winter the ocean
[in the Bering Sea region] was free of ice, sometimes with a wide strip of
water up to at least 200 miles away from the shore,” Swedish explorer Oscar
Nordkvist reported in 1822, in a document rediscovered by astrophysicist Willie
Soon.

“We were astonished by the total absence of ice in the
Barrow Strait,” Francis McClintock, captain of the
Fox, wrote in 1860. “I was here at
this time in 1854 – still frozen up – and doubts were entertained as to the
possibility of escape.”

In 1903, during the first year of his three-year
crossing of the Northwest Passage, Roald Amundsen noted that his party “had
made headway with ease,” because ice conditions had been “unusually favorable.”

The 1918-1940
warming also resulted in Atlantic cod increasing in population and expanding
their range some 800 miles, to the Upernavik area of Greenland, fisheries
biologist Ken Drinkwater has reported.

Climate
change is certainly real. It’s been real throughout Earth and human history –
including the Roman and Medieval Warm Periods, Little Ice Age and Dust Bowl,
and through countless other cycles of warming and cooling, flood and drought,
storm and calm, open polar seas and impassable ice.

Humans
clearly influence weather and climate on a local scale – through heat and
emissions from cities and cars, our clearing of forests and grasslands, our
diversion of rivers. But that is not the issue. Nor is it enough to say – as President
Obama has – that the climate is
changing and mankind is contributing to it.

The
fundamental issue is this: Are humans
causing imminent,unprecedented, global climate change disasters? And can we prevent those alleged disasters, by
drastically curtailing hydrocarbon use, slashing living standards, and imposing
government control over industries and people’s lives? If you look at actual
evidence – instead of computer model forecasts and “scenarios” – the answer is
clearly: No.

______________

Paul Driessen is senior policy
analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org) and author of Eco-Imperialism: Green power - Black death.

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Dennis T. Averyhas been quoted in publications ranging from Time and The Washington Post to The Farm Journal. His article, “What's Wrong with Global Warming?” was published in the August 1999 issue of Reader's Digest. With S. Fred Singer, Avery is the coauthor of Unstoppable Global Warming; Every 1500 Years. He travels the world as a speaker, has testified before Congress, and has appeared on most of the nation's major television networks, including a program discussing the bacterial dangers of organic foods on ABC's 20/20. Avery studied agricultural economics at Michigan State University and the University of Wisconsin. He holds awards for outstanding performance from three different government agencies and was awarded the National Intelligence Medal of Achievement in 1983. In addition to lending his expertise to CARE as a member of the Energy Counsel, Dennis Avery currently serves as Director, Center for Global Food Issues and is a Senior Fellow for the Hudson Institute is a non-partisan policy research organization dedicated to innovative research and analysis that promotes global security, prosperity, and freedom.

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Robert L. Bradley, Jr. is one of the nation’s leading experts on the history and regulation of energy and related sustainable development issues. He has presented professional testimony on energy issues to the California Energy Commission and United States Senate; his opinion-page editorials on energy policy have appeared in the New York Times and many other newspapers across the country; his energy views have been aired on National Public Radio, Voice of America, CBS Radio Network, and Armed Forces Radio, as well as local programs. Bradley is a multi-published author whose most widely read book is Energy: the Master Resource (with Richard Fulmer). His newest is Capitalism at Work: Business, Government and Energy. He holds a B.A. in economics, a masters in economics from the University of Houston, and a Ph.D. in political economy from International College. Bradley is a member of the International Association for Energy Economics, the American Economics Association, and the American Historical Association. He is CEO and founder of the Institute for Energy Research in Houston; visiting fellow of the Institute of Economic Affairs in London; an adjunct scholar of the Cato Institute; and a member of the academic review committee of the Institute for Humane Studies at George Mason University.

Paul Driessen’scareer has included staff tenures with the United States Senate, Department of the Interior and an energy trade association. He has spoken and written frequently on energy and environmental policy, global climate change, corporate social responsibility, and on marine life associated with oil platforms off the coasts of California and Louisiana. Driessen received his BA in geology and field ecology from Lawrence University, JD from the University of Denver College of Law, and accreditation in public relations from the Public Relations Society of America. A former member of the Sierra Club and Zero Population Growth, he abandoned their cause when he recognized that the environmental movement had become intolerant in its views, inflexible in its demands, unwilling to recognize our tremendous strides in protecting the environment, and insensitive to the needs of billions of people who lack the food, electricity, safe water, healthcare and other basic necessities that we take for granted. Driessen is a senior fellow with the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow and Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise, nonprofit public policy institutes that focus on energy, the environment, economic development and international affairs.

Michael J. Economidesis among America's leading energy analysts who regularly appears on national TV and radio programs. As a consultant, educator, and PhD petroleum engineer, Economides has done technical and managerial work in more than 70 countries. A professor at the Cullen College of Engineering, University of Houston, Economides has written or co-written about 200 articles and peer-reviewed papers and 11 textbooks. Economides is the Editor-in-Chief for the Energy Tribunemagazine. He is also the co-author, with Ron Oligney, of the industry primer, The Color of Oil: The History, the Money and the Politics of the World's Biggest Business, which was published in 2000 and has since been translated into five languages. CARE is honored to include Michael Economides as a member of the Energy Counsel.

Michael R. Fox, Ph.D., is a retired nuclear scientist and university chemistry professor. He is the science and energy writer/reporter for the HawaiiReport.com. A resident of Kaneohe, Hawaii, he has nearly 40 years experience in the energy field. His interests and activities in the communications of science, energy, and the environment has led to several communications awards, hundreds of speeches, and many appearances on television and talk shows. Dr. Fox is listed by the Heartland Institute as a global warming/climate change expert. He is also the Senior Fellow for Science at the Grassroot Institute of Hawaii. He can be reached via email at mfox@grassrootinstitute.org. Please visit Dr. Mike Fox's blog at http://www.foxreport.org/.

Byron King is the resident energy and natural resource expert at Agora Financial, LLC. A geologist by training, he worked for the former Gulf Oil Company and has followed oil industry developments for over 30 years. Byron’s career path also took him into the U.S. Navy, both active duty and reserve. In the 1990s and 2000s Byron engaged in a vigorous private law practice. For the past five years Byron has been writing about energy and natural resource issues for an international audience. Currently, Byron writes and edits two major publications, Outstanding Investments and Energy and Scarcity Investor. Byron holds degrees from Harvard, the U.S. Naval War College and the University of Pittsburgh.

Tom Tanton is the Principal of T2 & Associates, a firm providing consulting services to the energy and technology industries. Mr. Tanton has over 35 years experience in the energy, economy, and environmental fields.